§1. I finished Augustus by John Williams yesterday. I was hesitant going in because I was afraid I'd align myself too closely to that embarrassing popular male obsession with the Roman Empire—I'd been sliding dangerously close all late summer, after reading Robert Hughes' Rome (this was an art history book to be clear!) and visiting the city itself with my family—but thankfully this is not a book celebrating the pedestrian male excitement about the glories of empire.
§1.5. It isn't terribly experimental either, which I'd imagined it might be because of the general chatter surrounding Stoner, John Williams' more famous book, and because it was issued as part of NYRB's modern classics collection—I don't have a clear picture of how self-concerned exactly these institutions are yet, but my working assumption, refined over many failures to grasp references in LRB pieces, is: very.
§2. Augustus is a virtuous book; it tells the story of virtuous men, and one in particular whom the rest could not but worship: Octavius Caesar, the August. Its form is decidedly traditional, in that Williams' writing is good in what seems now a parochial sense. There are no extraordinarily long sentences or knots of clauses, there is no reliance on the mysterious mechanics of parataxis, there is no strip-mining of interiority; the language is honest and proper and one could imagine it at home among the trans-Atlantic aristocracy of the eastern seaboard of the United States.
§3. Virtue is only available within a well-established moral milieu; if this cultural structure is brought into question, what is virtuous becomes unintelligible. So Williams must make and maintain his commitments. He does, but it is to a notion of empire and government that isn't easily accessible from jaded postmodernity, and as a result his characters seem at times too fantastical, too cut off from reality. But I had to remind myself several times that the real break isn't here, between Augustus and the world, but between us post-moderns and history. If the notion of virtue in play in Augustus seems naive it's only because of the loss of innocence that has occurred since. (I'm not sure I believe this! Or at least, not that I believe this is bad.)